Thoughts on Damage Model

[Lusche]

Sorry for the late reply...been away a bit.

My thoughts are pilots shared kills in RL. 

Not in all airforces. Germans for example didn't. One plane, one kill. No shared stuff.

[grizz441]

Sorry for the late reply...been away a bit.

My thoughts are pilots shared kills in RL.  So how would it be if somebody did more than 33% damage then nobody got the kill and both pilots got an assist?  3 assists = 1 kill ?  There is nothing more frustrating than killing somebody who is showing no visible signs of damage and getting an assist, but wouldn't be so bad if I knew the first guy to shoot him got an assist on it as well.

Well it certainly wouldn't bother me as much as putting the kill shot on a seemingly very healthy aircraft and getting zero credit.

[TEXICAN]

Nemisis,

There's FAR too many variables. Could it happen? Maybe. But it's probably a one in a million shot. My post is aimed at ways to increase the robustness of the damage model WITHOUT resorting to random chance, which this would require.

Hmm one in a million thats how my Great Uncle was killed.  I have the letter that was sent to his mother.  It basicly says German plane hit the bomb load just before drop and the plane vaporized.  He was the navigator plane was B17.

[ToeTag]

Scan and post pleasse.....

[TEXICAN]

The letter is at my Grandmothers house I will try to get a picture of it next time Im there. 

[boomerlu]

I.E. look at the extreme case of you spent 1 min going around with the guy have a wing 99% damaged. You would not want the damage great enough to case some one to swoop in, put 1 303 on the target and get the kill.

Slight punt here...

On the topic of crit bonus - why not make it a multiplier instead of an additive bonus?

That way in this extreme case, you would be multiplying 1 303 hit. At 1.5x multiplier, somebody who does 40% of the damage but gets the critical hit will have exactly the same damage points accumulated towards the kill as someone who has done 60% of the damage. Sounds fairly reasonable to me, but of course you could tweak this.

IMO, multiplicative bonus would make the balancing far easier.

[Pongo]

Well.
Here is what I see happening,
MG aircraft not only have lighter guns, they have alot longer times of fire.(more rounds)
If small hits from MGs degrade the performance of the aircraft they strike, we can expect that spraying at 1k with 50 cals will be alot more relevent game activity.
The planes have the ammo. They have the balistics to hit a few and the enemy will have to respond or take a real chance to have their aircraft degraded.

So expect 50 cal fire to open at 1.3k, expect the target to have to start jinking at 1k.

Cannon birds, with less ammo, will of course have to hold off their harassing fire like they do now. The cowl mgs on some cannon birds will get a real work out though.

Formations of bombers will also be degrading enemy fighters flight performance at much longer ranges, those pings will slow you down now.
Similarly, mgs will force performance problems with bombers that only now happen with dead engines, formations will fall apart way quicker.

"that pouring 100 or so half-inch rounds into a zone about a foot across from 200yds won't knock a good-sized chunk out of the wing's surface skin? With the right hit you're not talking about individual bullet holes, because even MG fire can punch out a nice hunk of metal."
when I see arguments like this in defense of upping the capability of mgs, I wonder what version of history or the game people are playing. Are they really saying that they can or anyone could achieve this kind of accuracy in combat, and if they did, are they really saying that the current game wouldnt 100 percent of the time take of the wing with a hit like that?

[OOZ662]

I can see two arguments coming against you; "Good, it'll stop people from running from fights so much" and "Good, people will learn how to properly attack bombers instead of hovering dead aft for ten minutes."

[Pongo]

Not only is your observation totally based on social engineering instead of realism, it seems to want to encourage lame unhistoric game play instead of rewarding historic game play.
Unless the level of damage we are talking about is so trivial as to be mostly undetectable, in which case why bother.
I would think that the damage model as it is, with its abstractions might be better then what has been proposed here. Making incidental holes from mg fire degrade target capability, without makeing crazy long bursts of mg fire degrade(melt) the mgs that take them, is really not improving the overall gunfire, hit, damage resolution system of the game. IMHO
Destroying automatic weapons through overheating is not a "random" effect, any more then overheating an engine is a random effect.
Similarly, destroying the integrity of a spar or the skining of a wing through maneuver alone, is not really a random thing. The wing can be damaged to write off level without failing. Ie damaged to the point where it can no longer take its rated stress, but it can still get you home or take some amount of stress less then its factory spec. Will this proposed system make the manuver damage to an aircraft more incremental as well?

[OOZ662]

Those aren't my observations, that's why they're quoted. Seeing the future.

Then you broke out into some other entirely different piece of the discussion that I haven't been taking part in...so I have no reply.

[Saxman]

Not only is your observation totally based on social engineering instead of realism, it seems to want to encourage lame unhistoric game play instead of rewarding historic game play.
Unless the level of damage we are talking about is so trivial as to be mostly undetectable, in which case why bother.
I would think that the damage model as it is, with its abstractions might be better then what has been proposed here. Making incidental holes from mg fire degrade target capability, without makeing crazy long bursts of mg fire degrade(melt) the mgs that take them, is really not improving the overall gunfire, hit, damage resolution system of the game. IMHO
Destroying automatic weapons through overheating is not a "random" effect, any more then overheating an engine is a random effect.
Similarly, destroying the integrity of a spar or the skining of a wing through maneuver alone, is not really a random thing. The wing can be damaged to write off level without failing. Ie damaged to the point where it can no longer take its rated stress, but it can still get you home or take some amount of stress less then its factory spec. Will this proposed system make the manuver damage to an aircraft more incremental as well?

Pongo,

Scattering hits across the wing from 1000yds out probably still wouldn't cause much damage even under this model. As pointed out, individual holes wouldn't do much. Additionally I imagine the energy of the hit would STILL factor into even the incremental damage, so yeah, you may ping him up, but the lack of concentrated fire and the loss of energy would minimize the effect.

But putting a nice concentrated burst into the wing at close range can take out a significant amount of material.

[Saurdaukar]

Your right, 8 .50's firing at 800rpm for a solid 3 secs DON'T put a lot of lead on a target. Plus cannon shells only fragment so much. 1000 fragments the size of a grain of sand won't do as much as 20 quarter sized fragments.

Somewhere on the internet (also in a book I have) is a picture of a B17 which, unbelieveably, landed after being hit by a 30mm shell.  

The inner wing was absolutely shreded.  The "carve out" was easily 10-12 feet across and 5-6 feet deep into the wing.  No idea how the guy landed it.

The authors caption beneath the photo?  "Damage consistent with a single hit from a Mk108 30mm HE shell."

Its not the shrapnel so much as the blast.

.50's cant do that, relying on kenetic energy alone (exception given for incendiary ammunition).

If I cant find the picture online, Ill bring the book into the office and scan the page.  Youll be floored.

[Pongo]

OOZ, you gotta be kidding, say what you think then, Who cares what you think others will think. lol

Sax,
If the only damage you are looking for is a hole in the wing, that will certainly happen at X times farther then current damage is happening, you pick X.
What I described is probably the truth, people will fire MG batterys at much much farther then they currently do, because that small incremental damage will matter. So instead of long range fire being the sign of someone who doesn't understand how WW2 gunnery works, or the game works, it will become the sign of someone who knows how the game works.
Its not that it will drop the target out of the sky, its that it will force you do lose E to respond and that will get you caught or dictate the fight to you from an range that has nothing to do with what was possible in WW2. That happens now depending on the weapons at 600 yards. It will happen at way way farther then that with what you are proposing.
Its self evident right?

[OOZ662]

I don't really have any commentary on it any more. I said all my thoughts earlier on.

[Motherland]

I think a lot of people are missing the point... (or at least what I want the point to be )
It's not to make machine guns more effective.
It's not to make XYZ plane/playing style more or less effective.
It's to improve the feel of the game and make our simulated vehicles perform more similarly to their RL counterparts under all conditions, not just at 100% integrity... and as a result improve the experience of flying a damaged aircraft (at least to me it would). If you think about it, the characteristics of our aircraft rarely change other than having aileron or elevator authority halved, or the aircraft being reduced to a coffin, with (most of the time) not much in between.

HiTech asked three question's

More like, Rolling on the floor in laughter, thinking people do not really think much about the consequences of what they ask for.

Step 1.
Do you wish planes to die more quickly or less quickly, or the same.

Step 2.
Do you wish to be at more of a disadvantage with 1 bullet hit so fights will tend to be, who ever lands the first bullet wins.

Step 3.
How will any damage model change, change the tactics used in the game.

HiTech

These are very interesting questions and I will try to explain how I think about them a little on... let me just say that I had these specific in mind when I was thinking about this.

Now the original feelings of the thread seemed to split in a couple of camps;
A 25/50/75/100% piecewise deal, where once you reach the 25 (or whatever) threshold you lose 25% of efficiency, or
A 1% of total damage = 1% of efficiency lost, linear function

Now the first one helps to sidestep question two a bit, as a single round probably won't result in any advantage. However this also retains some of the 'if you don't reach x threshold, nothing happens' that is the main thing that most (or I at least) attest in the current damage model. Even at that, once you do reach 25% damage, which is a relatively small amount, your wing is now operating at only 3/4 efficiency.
The linear damage model gets rid of the thresholds, however it does introduce a pretty large factor of 'he who shoots first lives', even if it is by a small amount, and increases the lethality of machine guns considerably.



My goals were;
Completely get rid of incremental damage (with thresholds)
Keep the relative effectiveness of guns more or less where they are now.
Don't fundamentally change the way is played while improving the immersive experience of flying a damaged aircraft.

So, I didn't think of a piecewise or linear function, rather a square one.
What does this do?
Well...
A stray round or two is practically inconsequential; a small, scattered machine gun burst isn't going to be game changing, although it may give you a slight edge; a solid hit that doesn't quite knock the wing off is going to hurt; and once your wing reaches 70-80% of it's capacity it's time to start looking for an exit (or probably past that).
I'm defining 100% of damage as the wing falling off under +,-0G's force at that point. With this definition 100% damage isn't really a meaningful measurement since you're almost always going to be at at least 1G. For the sake of example I'll say that under practical conditions 1.8G's is breaking point (you'd have to be ridiculously careful, but at this point you could still theoretically nurse it back home). Assuming the standard wing can withstand 12G's of force (I don't remember any numbers here I just pulled on off of the top of my head ), and that the function of structural integrity of the wing is y=x^2, where y is the structural integrity of the wing, and x is the % of total damage points the wing can have before breaking at 0 G's. This would mean the wing would have to be at just under 92% total damage points possible to be at 85% structural integrity, meaning it would break under the force of 1.8G's.
The same thing can be applied to lift and drag, although these functions would be modified so that the wing still produces lift until it is absolutely gone. In this case, y (the equation unaltered for the sake of example) is % of lift subtracted from the wing at full efficiency (x is the same as it is in SI formula), and drag is % added compared to the drag the wing produces undamaged, with x again being the same.

I'll have more on this in a bit, better explained, more visual, situational, less confusing and help to not try to make you think to Middle School math.... with graphs!